Nemesis Market, a notorious corner of the darknet beloved by cybercriminals and drug dealers, has been suddenly shut down after German police seized control of its systems.
Germany's Federal Criminal Police (known as the BKA) has announced that it has seized the infrastructure of Nemesis and taken down its website.
At the same time, cryptocurrency worth 94,000 Euros was seized by police.
Since its inception in 2021, Nemesis Market has grown rapidly - with more than 150,000 user accounts and over 1,100 sellers registered worldwide - dealing in a wide range of products including, narcotics, hacked data, stolen goods, as well as ransomware and DDoS attacks.
According to investigators, almost 20% of all goods and services sold via the site were from Germany.
However, since last week visitors to the cybercrime and drugmarket site have been greeted with a warning from the authorities that it had been seized following a co-ordinated investigation by international law enforcement agencies that started in October 2022.
It's clearly not a case of all work and no play at the BKA, as whoever replaced the site's title page added an animation of a spaceship from a retro videogame zapping the Nemesis logo.
The site's admin, known as Francis, warned users to erase any digital tracks they may have left after discovering law enforcement agents had gained access to months' worth of data from the site:
Hello, I'm Francis Nemesis market got seized by one of the law enforcement in europe Please clean your house, they have access to all your info in the past two months I will update you guys soon Nemesis will be back soon
The warning will most likely have come too late for some of the many thousands of people who have used Nemesis Market, as police are likely to use collected data to identify individuals and make arrests.
At this stage, the BKA has not announced if any of Nemesis Market's administrators or key personnel have been identified or arrested as part of the site's seizure.
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